Monthly Archives: January 2018

The continual corruption and oppression here at Maryland’s Eastern Correctional Institution has reached monumental proportions. The unprecedented abuses and utter disregard for the health, safety and humanity of the prisoner population by this fascist administration further illustrates the dire conditions men and women nationwide face daily within this prison industrial complex. Make no mistake about it, corruption breeds impunity and vice versa.

Last year, one day after an inauguration, we showed up and marched with a rage that refused to go away quietly. As was evident all over the world even back then, we chose to resist, and demand change. Who are we? All of us! We are sisters and brothers in church, at school, at work, within the LBGTQ community, at Black Lives Matter rallies, and with the undocumented risking deportation from the very streets where we continue to march. If you are black, white, brown, male, female, or just simply have a heart, then please recognize the obvious: This is our time, not just to vote but also to be elected. Stand up! Lead!

Let us remember two fallen sons of Mother Africa who truly represent and exemplify the bravery and patriotism which best defines our collective fighting spirit and resolve, Comrade Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s former president, and the commander of ZANLA’s guerilla army, Gen. Josiah Magama Tongogara. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Sankara’s assassination, a cowardly act carried out by the neo-colonialist stooge and poor excuse for an African, Blaise Compaore.

During early 2018 prisoners across Florida are gonna “laydown” in nonviolent protest of the intolerable conditions in Florida’s prisons. The objectionable conditions being protested include unpaid slave labor, compounded by outright price-gouging in the system’s commissary and package services, and the gain-time scam that replaced parole, which, coupled with extreme sentencing, has created overcrowding and inhumane conditions.

It’s been a hard silence for the past five days since Operation PUSH launched a statewide prisoner strike in the Florida Department of Corrections prison system (FDOC or FDC) coinciding with Martin Luther King Day. Information from prisoners is coming in at a much slower pace than people on the outside had anticipated, but reports are slowly and steadily making their way through the walls, despite many obstacles.

Acting Mayor London Breed announced on Jan. 19 that San Francisco’s homicide tally in 2017 dropped from the year prior and marked a 42 percent decrease from totals recorded a decade ago. Acting Mayor Breed announced the drop in homicides at the Potrero Hill Recreation Center alongside Supervisor Malia Cohen, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott and community members engaged in the revitalization and activation of parks as part of the City’s HOPE SF initiative.

The California Board of Parole Hearings granted parole to John Clutchette in 2003, 2015, 2016 and again on Jan. 12, 2018. The boards deemed many of the records in his file unreliable and insufficient for a showing of present dangerousness. The reasons given by Gov. Brown for opposing his release appear to involve a desire to punish Mr. Clutchette for being labeled a Soledad Brother. Tell Gov. Brown to free John Clutchette now!

Edwin Hawkins, the four-time Grammy® Award-winning leader of The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ 1969 million-seller “Oh Happy Day,” died Jan. 15 at his home in the Bay Area, after a bout with pancreatic cancer. He was 74 years old. “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Edwin Hawkins – a celebrated artist, innovator and music icon. Though he will be greatly missed the world over, the message of love, life and encouragement that he incorporated into his music gives us all the same hope that we’ll join him in heaven and sing ‘Oh Happy Day,’” the Hawkins family said.

Covered California issued an analysis Thursday that examined the potential impacts of the current open-enrollment period – which remains open in California, but ended in federally facilitated marketplace states on Dec. 15 – and of recent federal decisions on premiums in individual markets across the nation. The analysis found that premiums could increase dramatically in 2019, with increases from 16 to 30 percent if no steps are taken to mitigate these increases.

The public, with its hunger for revenge, does not want to hear about personal acts of atonement by people who have been sentenced for a crime. Acts of atonement by the condemned are usually viewed as a ploy to save his or her own life – not as a genuine act of redemption. People on death row are deemed the lowest of the low. Many people believe death-row prisoners cannot be “reformed” because they are “unformed” as human beings.

On the 16th of January 2010, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza landed in Kigali to launch the nonviolent movement for democracy, peace and justice for all. On that day, she gave a serious hammer blow to the cornerstone of the regime fortress: fear. The fortress is shaking, the fear has shifted from fear of democrats and peacemakers to fear of the regime, as reflected in erratic diplomatic behavior and more repression. The regime has been totally exposed.

There is one place in the U.S. where slavery is still constitutionally legal: in prisons. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1864, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. But prisoners held in this enslavement are organizing resistance. Brave prisoners within the Florida state prison system have organized themselves into a month-long work strike called Operation Push. It began on Jan. 15, Martin Luther King Day. In a phone interview, an anonymous prisoner-activist specifically linked the strike to King’s legacy of protest against racism and economic injustice.

We concerned members of the international community call your attention to an egregious example of human rights violations in your respective jurisdictions: the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Specifically, we call on you both, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolfe and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, to release all relevant police and prosecution files and free Mumia Abu-Jamal now.

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We must raise the query, what is the value in a monument when our country has fallen so far backwards in race relations under this president? We need a movement. In Dr. King’s honor, every American must join this movement to establish justice, peace and equality of opportunity for all. Through reasoned compromise, both sides resolve every injustice with a plan of action. Each act of reconciliation is one step closer to King’s “Beloved Community.”

Acting Mayor London Breed, San Francisco’s first Black woman mayor, issued the following statement on Jan. 15, the birthday and federal holiday of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a time for solemn reflection and commemoration of the life and legacy of one of our country’s most distinguished leaders. It is a time for us to remember and think critically about the values he stood for: social and racial justice, service and equality."

There are many facts about King’s life that are not widely known to today’s African youth. One example is that he visited Africa before Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. Kwame Nkrumah invited King to Ghana’s independence celebration on March 6, 1957. Malcolm X’s first visited Egypt in 1959. King was light years ahead of his contemporaries on the South African question. It must be understood that the masses of Africans in the Western Hemisphere re-embraced pan-Africanism in the 1970s.

This declaration was authored by the pan-Africanist and socialist popular forces of the Caribbean nation of Barbados at Bridgetown, Barbados, on Saturday, Jan. 13, 2018, and submitted to the people and civil society organizations of the Caribbean for their endorsement and adoption. By describing the nations of Africa, the Republic of Haiti and the Central American nation of El Salvador as “shithole” countries, U.S. President Donald Trump has committed a despicable and unpardonable act of anti-Black, anti-African, anti-Brown racism and is “Persona Non Grata” in the entire Caribbean region.

Treasure Island (TI), part of San Francisco’s District 6, according to various censuses, is the third most diverse neighborhood in the U.S. Seventy percent of tenants are Black or Latina/o, and the majority are low-income. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC) documented District 6 to have the most eviction cases represented by the EDC in courts in 2016. The island’s better housing units, on the northwest side, are destined for redevelopment in the form of new, upscale apartment buildings as part of a larger development project.